Producers: MP3s are murdering my music

'They don't sound anything like the studio recordings'

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MP3 players and compressed music formats are killing off good music. That's according to a group of music producers, who say that compressing music completely destroys the way it's supposed to sound. The music moguls say that MP3s can never sound anywhere near as good as studio recordings because the compressed files you listen to on your iPod contains only 10 per cent of the original studio data.

"You can get used to awful," record producer Phil Ramone told Seattle Pi . "You can appreciate nothing. We've done it with fast food." Ramone said that listening to MP3s is a painful experience and that it's impossible to truly appreciate music in that format. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin said that listening to compressed music is like "listening through a screen door".

MP3s don't sound right

Sound engineer John Meyer told the Seattle newspaper: "It turns you into an observer. It forces the brain to work harder to solve it all the time. Any compression system is based on the idea you can throw data away, and that's proved tricky because we don't know how the brain works."

Compact discs contain only half of the original data in studio recordings, and even the best MP3s contain only a fifth of the CD information.